Spirit and Soul in the Therapeutic
Relationship:An Exploration of Hillman's Archetypal
Psychologyin Light of a case study in Boss'
Daseinsanalysis

byBrent Dean RobbinsDuquesne University

In "Peaks and Vales," Hillman (1979a)
laments the forsaken soul, confused and collapsed into the world of the
spirit, which, perhaps in a derogatory way, he equates with Puer. Hillman,
at first, seems to spout a synthetic rhetoric -- the very holiest of matrimonies
between the peaks of the spirit and the vales of the soul. But, Hillman's
own Vulcanic presence must ultimately take the perspective of the underworld.
And if one follows Hillman in his subsequent work, following this particular
essay, we find a Hillman (1979b) who, for example, in The Dream and
the Underworld, gives primacy to the soul. For Hillman, I will attempt
to show, there is no access to the spirit unless one allows it to show
itself in an image which can only be given from the depths. If there is
a Psyche-Puer marriage for Hillman, we cannot enter the threshold of their
mutual household until we've received Psyche's invitation to enter the
depths, and there -- and only there -- may we glimpse the peaks, where
Puer, let us say as Icarus, gives flight to his fancies. Yet, Hillman himself
is guilty of such Icarian flights; it is Psyche, perhaps, who holds his
feet to the ground, and, from there, invites him to see through, in his
magnificent way, into the lunar shades of the misty vales. In this investigation,
we can, therefore, allow Psyche to guide us into the threshold of her domain,
not so much by taking flights of fancy, but in following the more concrete
example of a particular case study. A case by Medard Boss (1973), featured
in his Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, provides (what seems
to me) to be the perfect case by which to see through into the depths such
that we may catch a glimpse of the peaks, and, dare I say, even take wing
into the horizon with Psyche in tow.

In Medard Boss' (1973) case of a
"Daseinsanalytically Modified Treatment of a Modern Neurosis of Dullness
and the Patient's Comments and Modifications," Boss tells the story of
his patient, a man who is clearly torn between the peaks and vales. Through
Boss' method of Daseinsanalysis, Boss follows his patient into the depths
of the underworld -- literally, a descent into madness, psychosis -- such
that what emerges is the patient's long buried image of the heavens in
the form of a church tower. Through a close reading of this case, I will
show how Hillman and Boss share a respect for the image of the dream as
it shows itself; and, further, I will attempt to more clearly articulate
how at least one patient discovered, in his descent into the depths, his
very possibility for ascension to the peaks. From this exploration of Boss'
text, it is possible to show how the Puer-Psyche marriage -- a hermeneutic
between Psyche & Soul -- is necessary in order to avoid either a) giving
primacy to soul, leading into a maddening descent into the world of the
fecal, Cthonic, and pathological, or b) giving primacy to spirit, which
leaves one cut off from the source of one's suffering and the images which
both personify and personalize the abstract world of the heights.

As we will see momentarily with
Boss' case study, Boss does not get sidetracked with his patient in the
ways Hillman warns can be the case with the "transcendentalist" or "psychoanalyst."
As Hillman writes, there are two ways of becoming sidetracked in therapy.
In the first case, one attempts to "liberate" the soul from its vale, which
is the position of the "transcendentalist." In the second case, one can
"reduce the spirit to a complex" and "thus deny the Puer's [the spirit's]
legitimate ambition and art of flying," which is the position of the "psychoanalyst."
In either case, one makes the mistake of giving primacy to soul or to spirit,
and thus, one pays a disservice to either Psyche or Puer. Boss' ability
to pay service to both soul and spirit, as they are defined by Hillman,
is nowhere more evident than in his "Daseinanalytically Modified Treatment
of a Modern Neurosis of Dullness," to which we may now turn. Further, following
a reading of this case, we may also begin to explore the cost for Hillman,
in his later works, of giving primacy to soul over spirit.

Boss' "Case of Dullness" concerned
the Daseinsanalysis of a 32-year-old physician with a middle class background.
Of the presenting problem, Boss explains: "as far back as he could remember,
the patient had been dogged by severe and unremmitting feelings of guilt
which had made his whole existence a continuous succession of self-punitive
and self-destructive acts" (Boss, 1973, p. 273). Prior to seeking treatment
with Boss, the patient had already been through analysis with two other
analysts, one a classical Freudian-oriented therapist and the other a Jungian
therapist.

While in analysis with the Freudian
therapist, the patient's dreams involved, per the interpretation of the
analyst, Oedipal themes related to castration anxiety. These dreams, writes
Boss, were of "a sensual relationship with a maternal figure, several times
with his actual mother. Each time a punishment ensued, at the hands of
a paternal dream figure aiming at the utterly wanton destruction of typical,
wholly phallic symbols" (Boss, 1973, p. 273). At first, these phallic symbols
were of a varied nature, but, gradually throughout the therapy, the phallic
images in the dream become more and more exclusively the image of a church
tower, "especially those of high Gothic style" (p. 273). In one particularly
powerful dream, the patient dreamt he was standing on the floor of a church
tower, while an older man, resembling his anatomy instructor at medical
school, proceeded to strike at the foundations of the tower with a scalpel-like
instrument. This dream of course was immediately interpreted by the Freudian
analyst as another symbolic collection of images relating back to the castration
anxiety of the patient's Oedipal complex. While this did not seem to register
with the patient at a deep, psychic level, he nevertheless learned to intepret
these dreams in the manner in which his analyst insisted; that is, the
patient learned from the analyst how to reduce the image of his church
tower to a prescribed idea -- the concept of castration anxiety -- behind
the image. Despite these interpretations, explains Boss of the patient,
"nothing changed during the 3-year analysis, in either the dreary monotony
of his dream life, the stereotyped character of his waking life, or the
chronically morose climate of his state of mind" (p. 274). Worse still,
the patient became even more overwhelmed with guilt, which was only partially
alleviated by his switch to a new therapist.

The patient's second analyst, in
the spirit of Jung, did not reduce the patient's dream image of the church
to something other than a church, but, rather, permitted the patient to
see his "dream churches as religious images" (p. 274). Rather than pathologizing
and reducing the church images to symbols of an Oedipal complex, the new
therapist convinced the patient "there was as much 'psychic reality' attached
to his (religious thoughts and notion) as to his sexual fantasies" (p.
274). Of course, the patient immediately felt relieved of his guilt, and,
instead, began to feel that his pathological idiosyncrasies were shared
with common humankind; "that his religious dreams ha(d) their fundamental
origin in archetypal structures" (p. 274). When, at least at an intellectual
level of engagement, the patient came to understand his dream images as
normalized patterns of experience -- universal, timeless, and shared in
common with all people -- the analyst sent him out into the world believing
he'd taught his patient all he had to teach. "Henceforth," persisted the
therapist according to Boss' account, "the patient could rely on his own
healthy understanding and need(ed) in no way regard himself as sick and
deviant" (p. 276).

Despite the Jungian analyst's optimism,
the patient yet again felt he had arrived at a "static condition" (p. 276).
Shortly after terminating this psychotherapy, he began to develop a peculiar
interest in collecting crystal. This interest, however, soon developed
into a compulsion to ceaselessly clean and polish the sparkling surfaces
of the crystal, which blossomed further into a obsessive-compulsive preoccupation
with cleanliness. The patient reached his breaking point when, after all
his hours of psychotherapy, he still felt himself lapsing into a dull torpor,
experiencing an "inner lack of direction and emptiness that made him regard
everything with a jeering and jaundiced eye" (p. 276). It was with this
new low that the patient finally attempted a third round of psychotherapy,
though he remained largely hopeless in the face of his suffering. And it
was in this state that Boss first encountered our patient.

Entering therapy with Boss, the
patient, in this desperate state, held out for one, single hope: "Where
was there something genuine and real to found which would make life worth
living?" (P. 275) What can we make of this question? For Boss, it is quite
clear that our dear patient has simply been overwhelmed with the numbing
intoxication of too much psychology! In both of the previous therapies,
the images of the patient's dreams had been reduced in one way or another
to "a derivative, non-autonomous something" (p. 275). The images of the
dream had been debased and severed from his life-world, such that the patient
became adrift in the "unreal mirages" of theoretical construction. Boss,
in an attempt to curtail this continual therapeutic disaster, instructs
the patient "clarify his being and find himself without psychology," and,
thus, for once, "to forgo further scientific discussion" (p. 276).

Before preceding further with Boss'
handling of the case, let us stop and reflect on what has transpired with
this patient. While Boss is not able to articulate it in quite the same
way, we can see that each of the two previous therapists had fallen into
one of the two side-tracks laid out by Hillman. On the one hand, the classical
Freudian therapist had fallen into the trap of the "psychoanalyst" by attempting
to reduce the image of the patient to a preconceived unconscious complex,
thus paying a disservice to the spirit; and, on the other hand, the Jungian
therapist, through intellectualizing and universalizing the image, had
attempted to liberate it from the vale, thus falling into the trap of the
"transcendentalist." Boss is right, to a certain extent, that each of the
therapists reduced the image to a 'derivative something.' But, perhaps,
with Hillman in mind, we can more clearly understand how each therapist
performs very different reductions. That is, the Freudian analyst reduces
spirit to soul, and the Jungian analyst reduced soul to spirit.

Yet, while Boss follows a framework
somewhat different than Hillman, we shall see that he is yet able to hold
spirit and soul at equidistance and allow each its say, and all for the
benefit of the patient.

Without the benefit of psychology,
thanks to Boss' urgings, the patient was able to dwell with his emerging
images on their own terms. After six months of therapy, largely consisting
of free association, the patient began to have recurring, nightly dreams
of locked toilets. Dwelling with the image of the toilet, the progression
of these dream images would lead the patient straight into the bowels of
the underworld. One dream in particular, at the end of the patient's succession
of toilet dreams, acted as a prelude to his psychotic break. Boss (1973)
recounts the dream:

Once again, the patient
found himself standing outside the locked door of a toilet. But this time
his urge to defecate was so overpowering that he flung himself against
the door with all his might and burst it open. But instead of getting through
to the toilet, as he had expected, he discovered he was standing in the
middle of a large church, directly in front of the baptismal font. A thick
rope hung from the vault of the ceiling over the font. It was the rope
with which the sexton tolled the largest bell in the tower. Now at his
wits end, he had no choice but to hoist himself, on the bell rope, high
up to the baptismal font where, still clutching the rope, he relieved himself.
His bowel movement would not stop; soon he was standing knee deep in his
own stool. He tried to escape the rising mass of excrement by scrambling
up the rope to the church tower, but his feel were stuck fast in the feces.
And somehow, with all this frantic scrambling, the bell rope had twisted
itself inextricably around his neck. Besides this, his frenzied efforts
to climb up the rope had meanwhile set the bell in motion in the tower.
Worst of all, with each resounding peal of the bell, the rope, in some
inexplicable way, wound itself around the revolving axis of the bell, so
that between the tug of the bell rope dragging him upward and the binding
mass of feces tightening its hold on his feet, he was rapidly being torn
in two. In the agony of this bodily torture he startled out of the dream.
(p. 276-277)

Following this dream, the patient quickly
disintegrated into psychosis and became immersed in the world of the fecal.
Auditory hallucinations taunted him, calling him "shitter," and olfactory
hallucinations overwhelmed him with the pungent odor of sewage and feces
which followed him wherever he went. Crying out in rage at Boss for allowing
him to be "robbed of his dignity" by his immersion in this world of shit,
he violently tore the therapy room to shreds before promptly falling into
a catatonic state which lasted for two days. Boss tube-fed the patient
and sat by his side all hours of the day, until, on the second day, the
patient emerged from his catatonia, threw his arms around Boss, and cried
over and over again, "Mummy, Mummy, dear, dear, Mummy, Mummy, dear, dear"
(p. 277) Within two weeks, having descended into the fecal underworld,
the patient was able to resume therapy, though, not surprisingly, still
filled with terror and burning questions: "What evil genius had allowed
him to commit the blasphemy of bringing his stool into the church and into
the baptismal font, of all places?"

In response to the patient's question,
Boss countered with still another question: "Is it not of the very nature
of man that he must at all times reconcile himself to his essential state
of being spread between heaven and earth?"

With this reframing of the patient's
question, the patient was able to begin the process of integrating spirit
and soul; an integration which would involve, for the patient, a flood
of memories. Again dwelling with the image of the church as a church --
on its own terms -- the patient recalled that, since beginning his medical
training, he had "closed his mind to the beckoning call of the church tower,"
now understood as the patient's "mighty gesture toward heaven" (p. 276).
And, further, it was the patient's anatomy instructor, who held the scalpel-like
blade in the patient's initial dream, who "through his enlightenment and
cynicism had brought about the collapse of the patient's faith in God"
(p. 278). The patient, that is, had closed himself off from the call to
the spiritual heights of his youthful religious aspirations, and, as a
result of the deprivation of this, one his fundamental possibilities of
being, he suffered. Yet, the patient was unable to gain access to this
fundamental mode of relatedness to the world until he was also opened to
the world of the earthy and fecal from which the church tower could, once
again, be erected. It is, after all, from out of the toilet that the church
tower springs in the dream of the patient. As Hillman has already attempted
to persuade us, the patient was unable to access the world of the spirit
unless through the image provided by the soul from the underworld.

If it is true, as Hillman says,
that we must first access the soul in order to gain access to the spirit,
then why did the original Freudian analyst, who gave primacy to the soul,
fail so miserably? As the patient himself explains:

I didn't dare go into this
area of filth without reservation, because I somehow sensed from the beginning
that the spiritual, religious sphere had no sustaining strength for my
analyst. He continually tried to reduce my dream churches to genital symbols.
The enrie domain of the holy seemed to him to be merely a sort of sublimated
haze. That explains why there was no rope in the psychic compass of that
first analytic situation, like the one fastend to the ceiling in my church-excrement
dream, to which I could cling and achor myself in my descent into the earthy,
fecal region. The danger was far too imminent that I would be plunged into
filth and chaos beyond recall. (Boss, 1973, p. 278)

In light of this patient's experience
with classical Freudian analysis, it may come as no surprise that most
classical analysts feel that there is no escape from psychosis. Traditional
psychoanalysis, so concerned with the depths, had forgotten about the liberatory
potential of the heights to pull the psychotic back into the world of the
living. Yet, because Boss was able to hold back preconceptions about the
phenomena presented to him in the therapy, he allowed a space for both
spirit and soul.

In conclusion, this case appears
to be a rather beautiful illustration of the therapeutic potential of a
Puer-Psyche marriage in psychotherapy. The Psyche, on her own terms, is
unfathomable and ungraspable. Without Puer's drive and goals, Psyche becomes
lost in the undifferentiated shadows of the fecal underworld. Yet, without
the reflective capacity of Psyche, Puer "takes its drive and goal literally,"
and is unable to see through to the depths. With the immersion into the
depths of the soul, the patient is able to dwell with his pathology --
the logos of the pathos -- but only when this drive of the soul to pathos
is brought into language and given "a sense of process, direction, (and)
continuity" through the logos of spirit. Without Puer, the suffering of
Psyche makes no sense. Without the perspective of the peaks, the suffering
of the vales can go nowhere but deeper into the darkness, from which there
is no return. It is, after all, as we've seen with this patient, the heights
which we hunger for, which drives us onward, despite the understanding
of mortality, limitation and death which Psyche knows so well. Yet, without
our roots planted in the fertile soil of the earth, we cannot expand toward
the heights, which would remain closed off to us, no matter how much we
may yearn to reach them.

As Hillman (1979a) writes:

The Psyche has spiritual
needs, which the puer part of us can fulfill. Soul asks that its preoccupations
be not dismissed as trivia but seen through in terms of higher and deeper
perspectives, the verticalities of the spirit. When we realize that our
psychic malaise points to a spiritual hunger beyond what psychology offers
and that our spiritual dryness points to a need for psychic waters beyond
what spiritual discipline offers, then we are beginning to move both therapy
and discipline.

It is unfortunate, even as a form of
extreme compensatory rhetoric, that Hillman, in his later years, forgets
the importance of this spiritual drive toward the heights, and, instead,
gives primacy to the soul. Surely, without the excremental vision of the
soul, we cannot come to terms with our finitude, with the fact that the
intentional bodies we are continually decay and give off feces even as
we aspire to bodiless, perspectiveless, Icarian flights from which we are
doomed to fall once again to the earth from which we arose. We cannot escape
the fact that we are beings which shit. But we must never forget that it
is our fanciful flights toward the peaks which drive us onward, which keep
us alive rather than falling into the despairing depths of the underworld,
upon which is inscribed, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." It is the
peaks which hold our hope, so that we may transform the filth below our
feet into beautific creations.

As therapists, we can learn from
Boss' approach to his patient that we can hold ourselves open to both possibilities
of relatedness, the peaks and the vales of our patients. It is Boss'
philosophical grounding which enables him to understand that, in either
case, whether we fly toward the peaks or sink into the depths, it is always
is in the service of our humanity, our existence. After all the verticality
of heights and depths, it is to these psychological places -- we must never
forget -- which we turn in the service of our horizonal relations in-the-world
with others and alongside things. Whether we follow Psyche into the shadows
of the underworld or spread our wings with Puer toward the sun, we can
only do harm if it is not, in the end, to return to that place, with our
feet on the ground and our head toward the sky, from which we can turn
and stand face to face with another human being.

REFERENCES

Boss, M. (1973) Psychoanalysis
and Daseinsanalysis. New York: Basic.

Brown, N. O. (1959) Life Against
Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. Hanover: Wesleyan University
Press.

Fuller, A. (1990). Insight into
Value: An Exploration of the Premises of a Phenomenological Psychology.
New York: State University of New York Press.